About Me
Bio
My name is Facundo Alcides Decunta. I am from Chivilcoy, a small town in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I studied Environmental Science at the University of Buenos Aires and graduated in 2021. That same year, I started my PhD program at the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires.
Research
I study how plants interact with symbiotic microorganisms and insect herbivores. My study model is the symbiosis between cool-season grasses and Epichloë endophytes, a well-known defensive mutualism. Currently, I study this symbiosis in the context of belowground herbivory.
Teaching
I was an assistant teacher in the Ecology Department at the Faculty of Agronomy, University of Buenos Aires, from 2018 to 2022. After that, I moved to the Department of Quantitative Methods and Information Systems, where I have been ever since. I've been teaching students of Environmental Science and Agronomic Engineering their first Statistics course.
Programming
Most of my useful coding is done in R, as it is the language we use for statistics in ecology. I mostly write R code for data analysis, but I have also worked a bit with R packages. I contributed to orchaRd, a package used for meta-analysis, by writing a couple of functions for conducting and plotting leave-one-out analyses.
My other programming work is related to small personal projects. I like to write small tools for very specific problems, or just try to build something and see if it works. For this non-work programming, I usually use Python, but I have also done some C, Go, and written lots of small Bash scripts.
Veganism
I am vegan. Many people can decide every day what to eat. Some food options require animals to suffer and be killed; some options don't. Whenever possible, choose the latter. Nobody should pay for a product that requires suffering and pain to be produced. Also, veganism is a win-win-win: it is good for your health, good for the environment, and good for the animals (Tilman & Clark, 2014; Clark et al. 2018; Clark et al. 2019; Scherer et al. 2019).